La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995) shows practices of resistance of youngsters in public space. Next to the traditional milieus of socialisation – at home, at school or in institutionalised leisure facilities – youngsters demand their ‘place’ in public space. In doing so, they partly privatise public space (‘parochial space’). In this article we argue that transgressive behaviour of youngsters should be conceptualised as both a side-effect of growing up and socialisation, and as resistance against adult domination, especially in public space. As such, hanging around is cause and effect of control and criminalisation.

Het recht onder het EVRM, zoals zich dat vormt in de rechtspraak van het EHRM, leidt tot inconsistenties in het Nederlandse schadevergoedingsrecht: een naaste van een persoon die slachtoffer is geworden van een schending van het recht op leven kan tegenwoordig immers alleen vergoeding van eigen immateriële schade vorderen als de schending is gepleegd door een overheidsorgaan. Deze inconsistentie verdient aandacht, maar men realisere zich dat we hier raken aan bredere problematiek. Wij menen daarom dat er in de discussie over de inconsistentie eerst aandacht moet zijn voor de bredere vragen: hoe werken fundamentele rechten door en welke derde verdient waarvan vergoeding? Centraal staan daarbij steeds de overkoepelende kernvragen: wie verdient rechtens een remedie en waarom?

Over the last 60 years, attention has been drawn periodically to offenders in different age categories, such as young children, adolescents and young adults, and tor services and programmes that should be available for these groups. In 2011, the State Secretary of Security and Justice proposed a penal law for adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 23. Such a proposal requires a (empirical) view of young adult offenders (aged 18 to 24) and the penal sanctions they receive in comparison with adolescent (aged 12 to 17) offenders and adults (aged 25 to 30). Crime statistics show that prevalence, type and seriousness of crime committed by young adults are different from that of adolescents and adults. Self-report studies show fewer and smaller differences, but this may be explained in part by the more serious nature of offences committed by young adults, which are usually not addressed in self-reports. Outcomes support the idea that a separate approach and specific interventions for young adults are needed. Similarities with adolescents with regard to neurobiological development justify a focus on a more pedagogical and behavioral approach, which is also a key feature of penal justice for juveniles.

Per 1 januari 2012 zal er een Boek 10 BW zijn dat de codificatie bevat van een groot deel van het Nederlandse IPR. Het gaat om een consolidatie van een reeks IPR-wetten die sedert 1980 tot stand zijn gekomen. Aandacht wordt besteed aan het proces van voorbereiding van Boek 10, aan de functie van de redelijkheid en billijkheid in het IPR, aan de geschiktheid van het BW als onderdak voor het IPR, aan de verhouding tot het buitenlandse IPR en aan enige algemene bepalingen.

In the last five years the number of armed robberies on jewelry stores in the Netherlands has increased again and reached an all-time high in 2010. In this article, recent developments are discussed. The absolute number of these robberies is not very large, but in terms of the chance of being robbed, jewelry stores belong to the most threatened in retail. In general, armed robberies on jewelry stores show a pattern very similar to robberies on other retail targets. About two third are hit-and-run robberies, committed by offenders who live nearby and are generally known to the police as repeat offenders. A smaller portion of these robberies is committed by offenders operating more professionally. In the last ten years there were no big changes in the way these crimes were committed. Contrary to other types of robbery this crime is often profitable. The size of the loot is relatively high. In recent years the price of gold has dramatically increased. This might be considered an independent risk factor. Nevertheless, it's too simple to assess the recent increase of armed robberies on jewelry stores as a direct consequence of this development.

This essay charts the changing status of the death penalty in western societies, from a cultural universal three hundred years ago to a prohibited penalty today, and offers a sociological explanation for that great transformation. The ability to impose the penalty of death is an elementary particle of state power. That power was frequently and spectacularly deployed in early modern Europe as states asserted a monopoly on legitimate violence and absolutist rulers deployed force to subdue their enemies. Once states consolidated their infrastructural power, the ostentatious killing of subjects became less necessary. As liberal politics limited the legitimate use of state violence and established legal protections for individuals, and as cultural change softened state power, the death penalty became increasingly problematic. The character of state power, and the balance between liberalism and democracy, civilized refinement and humanitarian sensibility, explains the pace and extent of death penalty change in specific western nations.

Two explanations can be found for the unequal geographical concentrations of avoidance behaviour: (1) the demographic composition of residential areas, and (2) the social and structural contextual effects of residential areas. Different studies all over the world have shown that women report more fear of crime than men. In this article we study contextual as well as individual determinants of avoidance behaviour for men and women separately to gain a better insight in the explanation of individual differences in avoidance behaviour. The theoretical framework of this study is derived from the collective efficacy theory. In the present study a contextual model was tested on a 2009 survey of 2,080 residents from 40 municipalities in Flanders (Belgium), by using block-wise multilevel analyses on data from the Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders Survey (SCIF-survey), the Security Monitor and the registered crime statistics. The results indicate that economic disadvantage in the residential area increases the risk on avoidance behaviour both for men and women, because these areas often have high disorder and violent crime rates. With regard to the social ecology of crime this study shows that more research is needed on the differences in contextual effects of structural area characteristics on avoidance behaviour.

In 2001 oordeelde de Hoge Raad dat bij onenigheid over de omvang van een overgedragen onroerende zaak of de vestiging van een beperkt recht, de notariële akte moet worden uitgelegd aan de hand van objectieve maatstaven. Op die wijze van uitleg is in de literatuur kritiek geuit, die de Hoge Raad vooralsnog geen aanleiding heeft gegeven om op zijn oordeel terug te komen. Twee zaken waarin de uitleg van een notariële leveringsakte aan de orde kwam, werden begin dit jaar afgedaan met art. 81 Wet RO. De ‘objectieve uitleg’ van een notariële vestigingsakte werd nogmaals bevestigd in een arrest van 22 oktober jongstleden. In dit artikel pleit de auteur voor herbezinning op de wijze van uitleg van notariële akten.

Is the design of a city a decisive factor in the development of violent behavior by its inhabitants? The discussion following the 2005 riots in the French suburbs shows that many blame the concept of La Ville Radieuse and its most famous founding father, the architect Le Corbusier, for the social degeneration of the banlieues. For some critics, like the British author Theodore Dalrymple, this ‘totalitarian’ architecture symbolizes the evil of the welfare state with its social security, mass immigration, egalitarism and its elites with their blindness for the threat to the western Enlightenment values coming from these ‘black’ suburbs. However, the truth of urban development is that cities are fundamentally unpredictable. After several generations a building will be used in a completely different way than perceived, by people whose existence one wasn't aware of and in a social context one couldn't have predicted. This ‘natural’ development is labeled as the failure of a project, often leading to a policy of repression and demolition. However, local politicians, project developers and architects should realize that it's not their actions that determine the development of cities, but the way the inhabitants use and interpret their environment. They create their own city. Instead of replacing the inhabitants by demolishing their houses, we probably have no other choice than getting to know these quarters better and renovate these together with and for the local inhabitants.

Since 1 January 2005, citizens in the Netherlands are obliged to show their ID if a police officer asks them to. The (extended) identification duty is meant to prevent crimes and to improve the enforcement of the law. Bart van Klink (Tilburg University) and Nicolle Zeegers (University of Groningen) have investigated how the identification duty is enforced in legal practice by interviewing 12 police officers in 4 different cities and looking at statistical data on enforcement. According to most of the police officers interviewed the identification duty helps to remove anonymity from citizens, which may keep them from committing crimes (in particular crimes in groups, e.g., hooligans). Moreover, the identification duty appears to be instrumental in normalizing citizens: by asking for an ID, police officers are able to discourage behaviour that conflicts with some (legal or moral) standard of normality. This small-scale empirical research indicates that police officers stress the law’s preventive effect. Although prevention may be a valuable goal, it may also constitute a pretext for far-reaching intrusions on citizens’ freedom. An important normative question is how to prevent the police from using this legal instrument too actively for the sake of prevention.

De medisch adviseur in letselschadezaken is een ‘onafhankelijke partijdeskundige’. Deze ogenschijnlijke tegenstrijdigheid maakt dat het voor medisch adviseurs niet altijd duidelijk is hoe zij als partijdeskundige vorm en inhoud zouden moeten geven aan hun onafhankelijkheid. Op 26 mei 2009 heeft het Regionaal Tuchtcollege Amsterdam twee uitspraken gedaan, waarin het zich duidelijk heeft uitgelaten over de rol en de positie van de medisch adviseur in letselschadezaken: de medisch adviseur is in de eerste plaats arts, daarnaast medisch adviseur, en geen regisseur, pleitbezorger of belangenbehartiger van zijn opdrachtgever.

Propositions of law are based upon normative judgement. The interpretation and application of legal provisions rest upon a judgement that determines which weight must be attributed to some point of view or perspective. In this respect, legal theory has a normative character. Its normative character does not preclude legal theory from being a scientific discipline. The scientific character of legal theory is not located in the possibility of testing the correctness of its theories. Rather, legal theory owes it scientific character to the shared standards of production and evaluation of legal arguments: the grammar of justice.

Radicalization and terrorism remain areas of special interest in terms of security policies. It’s common knowledge that most of the activities related to radicalization and terrorism heavily rely on the involvement of multiple actors. Therefore, an increased understanding of the underlying social structures is considered to offer important leads for the development of effective countermeasures (in particular when related to demographic, cultural, psychological and other social factors). Yet, the number of empirical network studies in this domain (at least those openly available) that incorporate arithmetic tools known as Social Network Analysis (SNA) remain extremely scarce. In this paper the author presents an exploratory Social Network Analysis of the Hofstad network based on publicly available data. Members of the Hofstad network, a radical Islamist network in the Netherlands, were active recruiters for the violent jihad, spreaded radical propaganda, some attended training camps in Pakistan, and the network was suspected of planning several terrorist attacks on strategic objects and prominent people in the Netherlands. One of the members, Mohammed B., was sentenced to life in prison for murdering the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004. Although the Hofstad network was considered by trial as a terrorist organization in the first instance in 2006, the judgment was reversed on appeal in 2008 when most members were acquitted. As is characteristic of home-grown networks, our analysis indicated that the Hofstad network (N=67) was relatively sparse and decentralized and evolved around a more cohesive core of key players (N=13). The key players were identified based on their central network position and a hierarchical clique analysis. Mohammed B., who had been considered a marginal player by the secret service, turns out to be the most central actor of the network. Although the analysis clearly suggests that quantifying network structures provides actionable intelligence, more research is needed to validate the results.